Photo via Flickr and Tennessee Journalist http://www.flickr.com/photos/tnjn/
After the Spurs got blown out in game 2 of the NBA Finals, my wife asked me if I thought Coach Pop was going to chew out the team. I told her that if he did, it wouldn’t be anything that they hadn’t heard before. They knew what they did wrong and what they have to fix.
Then I started to think about what this situation would look like in our spiritual life. When we sin and create barriers between ourselves and God, does He pull us aside and chew us out? No, he doesn’t because whether we like to admit it or not, we know when we mess up and what we have to do to fix things. First of all, we need to repent of our sins. That means we have to ask God to forgive us, and we also need to go to those we may have wronged and ask for their forgiveness as well. At least for me, the second part of that scenarios is always the hardest because we have to humble ourselves to admit to someone else that we were wrong.
Next, go to Confession. This is the part where I think about coach or the Father yelling at me, but trust me, in all my years of Confession it’s never happened, and I’ve confessed some doozies. When you go to Confession, be sure to make a make good examination of conscience. A good habit it to get into is doing a quick examination every night so you don’t have to remember everything all at one time. Another thing to think about is going to a regular confessor. In case you fall into habitual sins, he will know and might be able to offer more directed advice.
That’s it! No laps, no yelling, just the absolution offered by Christ and His Church.
